The Measure of a Man

On the morning in question, as he stood in the open showers, a boy next to him grabbed his chest, saying he wanted to know what it felt like to touch a girl's breast. That was just one of thousands of indignities he would encounter or bring upon himself.

In his sophomore year at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, his fraternity brothers determined that he should lose his virginity at a party in a cabin by a lake and enlisted the help of an attractive woman a couple of years older than he. She took his hand and led him into a bedroom. She lay down and motioned for him to join her. As he did, he realized she had passed out, having drunk herself silly before having sex with a 250-pound 19-year-old.

One afternoon in law school, reading in a wooden armchair, he started to get up only to realize that he was stuck in the chair.

"My body had essentially flowed out to fill the space between the arms and seat," he writes. "My hips were captured; my bottom stayed glued to the chair and the whole thing lifted up with me as I tried to stand. . . . I felt all eyes on me, understood that people didn't want to look but, as at a train wreck, couldn't turn away."

He decided to play the clown. "Still crouched over, taking small, constricted steps, I carried [the chair] across the room, somewhat like a turtle with its shell, and sat down once again." Today he winces at all the times he played the jolly fat man: leading college cheerleaders onto the football field by pedaling a miniature girl's bike; assuming the role of Santa Claus at White House Christmas parties, the Easter Bunny at the vice president's residence. Perhaps his experience in acting the fool is why he was able to ignore the advice of a friend who tried to steer him away from writing a book about his fatness, saying it would be "undignified."

Undignified? His pal, like so many thinner people, didn't know from undignified.

Berman realized pretty quickly as a teen that in order to be taken seriously and make something of his life, he would have to develop talents other than vaudeville. In the family rec room, his parents taught him ballroom dancing -- the first thing, he writes, that his rotund body was good at. He took up musical theater in high school and continued it in college. He managed his first political campaign in junior high for a girl running for president of the student council. She lost, but the campaign taught him he could succeed in politics behind the scenes. He didn't need to be cute, just hardworking, shrewd and resourceful.

He would have preferred to be a football star. "Over time, though -- and largely without my noticing from day to day -- I realized that something sort of wonderful had been happening," he writes. "My various 'compensations' had been adding up to a pretty good approximation of the sort of life I feared I'd never have. I was busy; I had friends; I was appreciated and respected for things I was good at."

Scared for His Health

One of the things he was, and is, good at, says wife Carol, is listening to and valuing women.

In the book, Berman calls Carol "the strongest and most stable component" of his life. But their first date almost didn't happen. It was Aug. 1, 1964, and Berman, 26, had been hired to lead a voter registration drive in a Duluth suburb for President Lyndon Johnson's reelection campaign. After swearing off blind dates at least half a dozen times, he arrived at the door of the apartment for yet one more try, this time with Carol Podhoretz, a 24-year-old speech pathologist.

She greeted him in a nice dress, stockings and high heels. Taking one look at his 288-pound frame, she announced that she had a headache and wouldn't be able to go out. Here we go again, he thought. But then she invited him in for a drink.

"He was big, and I reacted like a lot of young women would have reacted," Carol Berman recalls in a phone conversation. "He asked me why I worked as a speech pathologist and I really liked the reaction I got when I said I liked to help people. He said, 'I love that.' "